Retroreflective pesticide-impregnated animal collars have been desired but never achieved in a practicable and commercial product. U.S. Pat. No. 4,091,766 teaches an animal collar which includes on one side a lighttransmitting elongated flattened tube into which a reflective strip may be inserted and on the other side an absorbent material which may be impregnated with pesticide. Such a collar is elaborate, expensive and bulky, and so far as known is not presently used.
The present invention provides a much more simple and compact reflectorized pesticide-impregnated animal collar and accomplishes this result by adhering retroreflective sheeting directly to a pesticide-impregnated polymeric strip. This direct-adhesion approach required the overcoming of a number of obstacles. For one, pesticide impregnated in the polymeric strip acts as a plasticizer, which migrates out of the strip during use of the collar, and attacks components of the reflective sheeting. Particularly a polymeric binder layer in the reflective sheeting, in which transparent microspheres are supported, may be attacked and softened; and a specularly reflective aluminum coating underlying the microspheres may be corroded to a nonspecular condition.
Also manufacturing operations on the animal collar during and after lamination of the reflective sheeting to the polymeric strip apply stress to the reflective sheeting that in some cases can tear the sheeting and in other cases can cause the sheeting to wrinkle and delaminate from the polymeric strip.
Because of such difficulties, animal collars made by laminating prior-art reflective sheetings to pesticide-impregnated polymeric strips had a useful life of less than three weeks.